#i need to draw my farmer and Harvey as soon as possible

[pompkns]

I just know Harvey wants my farmer. They even go shopping together.

[kcrabb88]

Queer Movies/Books/TV Shows for Pride Month!

Happy Pride everyone!! For your viewing/reading pleasure I have made a (non-exhaustive) list of queer media that I have enjoyed! 

Movies/Documentaries

Pride (2014): An old tried and true favorite, which meets at the intersection of queer and workers’ rights. A group of queer activists support the 1985 miners’ strike in Wales (complete with a sing-through of Bread and Roses + Power in a Union)

Portrait of a Lady on Fire: On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman (or, two young lesbians fall in love by the sea, and you cry)

God’s Own Country: Young farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker for lambing season ignites an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path (Seriously this movie is GREAT and doesn’t get enough love, watch it! It’s rough but ends happily)

The Half of It:  When smart but cash-strapped teen Ellie Chu agrees to write a love letter for a jock, she doesn't expect to become his friend - or fall for his crush (as in she falls for his crush who is another girl. This movie was so good, and really friendship focused!) 

Saving Face:  A Chinese-American lesbian and her traditionalist mother are reluctant to go public with secret loves that clash against cultural expectations (this is an oldie and a goodie, with a happy ending!)

Moonlight:  A young African-American man grapples with his identity and sexuality while experiencing the everyday struggles of childhood, adolescence, and burgeoning adulthood (featuring gay men of color!)

Carol:  An aspiring photographer develops an intimate relationship with an older woman in 1950s New York (everyone’s seen this I think, but I couldn’t not have it here)

Milk: The story of Harvey Milk and his struggles as an American gay activist who fought for gay rights and became California's first openly gay elected official (the speech at the end of this made me cry. Warning, of course, for death, if you don’t know about Harvey Milk)

Pride (Hulu Documentary):  A six-part documentary series chronicling the fight for LGBTQ civil rights in America (they go by decade from the 50s-2000s, and there is a lot of great trans inclusion in this)

Paris is Burning (Documentary): A 1990s documentary about the African American and Latinx ballroom scene. Available on Youtube!

A New York Christmas Wedding:  As her Christmas Eve wedding draws near, Jennifer is visited by an angel and shown what could have been if she hadn't denied her true feelings for her childhood best friend (this movie is SO CUTE. It’s really only nominally a Christmas movie and easily watched anytime. Features an interracial sapphic couple!) 

TV Shows 

Love, Victor: Victor is a new student at Creekwood High School on his own journey of self-discovery, facing challenges at home, adjusting to a new city, and struggling with his sexual orientation (this is a spin-off of Love, Simon, and it’s very sweet and well done! Featuring a young gay man of color)

Sex Education:  A teenage boy with a sex therapist mother teams up with a high school classmate to set up an underground sex therapy clinic at school (this has multiple queer characters, including a featured young Black gay man and also in season 2 there is a side ace character!) 

Black Sails: I mean, do I even need to put a summary here? If you follow me you know that Black Sails is full of queer pirates, just queers everywhere.

Gentleman Jack:  A dramatization of the life of LGBTQ+ trailblazer, voracious learner and cryptic diarist Anne Lister, who returns to Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1832, determined to transform the fate of her faded ancestral home Shibden Hall (Period drama lesbians!!! A title sequence  that will make you gay just by watching!) 

Tales of the City (2019):  A middle-aged Mary Ann returns to San Francisco and reunites with the eccentric friends she left behind. "Tales of the City" focuses primarily on the people who live in a boardinghouse turned apartment complex owned by Anna Madrigal at 28 Barbary Lane, all of whom quickly become part of what Maupin coined a "logical family". It's no longer a secret that Mrs. Madrigal is transgender. Instead, she is haunted by something from her past that has long been too painful to share (this is based on a book series and it’s got lots of great inter-generational queer relationships!) 

The Haunting of Bly Manor:  After an au pair’s tragic death, Henry hires a young American nanny to care for his orphaned niece and nephew who reside at Bly Manor with the chef Owen, groundskeeper Jamie and housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (sweet, tender, wonderful lesbians. A bittersweet ending but this show is so so wonderful)

Sense8: A group of people around the world are suddenly linked mentally, and must find a way to survive being hunted by those who see them as a threat to the world's order (queers just EVERYWHERE in this show, of all kinds)

Books

Loveless by Alice Oseman:  Georgia has never been in love, never kissed anyone, never even had a crush – but as a fanfic-obsessed romantic she’s sure she’ll find her person one day. This wise, warm and witty story of identity and self-acceptance sees Alice Oseman on towering form as Georgia and her friends discover that true love isn’t limited to romance (don’t be turned off by this title, it’s tongue-in-cheek. This is a book about an aroace college girl discovering herself and centers the importance and power of platonic relationships! I have it on my TBR and have heard great things)

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters: Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel (again, don’t be thrown off by the title, it too, is tongue-in-cheek. This book was GREAT, and written by a trans women with a queer-and especially trans--audience in mind)

A Tip for the Hangman by Allison Epstein: A gay Christopher Marlowe, at Cambridge and trying to become England’s best new playwright, finds himself wrapped up in royal espionage schemes while also falling in love (this book is by a Twitter friend of mine, and it is a wonderful historical thriller with a gay man at the center).

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer: a very very queer remix of The Picture of Dorian Gray (which was already quite queer), featuring amazing female characters, a gay Basil, and a much happier ending than the original. 

Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston: The gay prince of England and the bisexual, biracial first son of the president fall in love (think an AU of 2016 where a woman becomes president). Featuring a fantastic discovery of bisexuality, ruminations on grief, and just a truly astonishing book. One of my favorites!

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston:  For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. She can’t imagine how waiting tables at a 24-hour pancake diner and moving in with too many weird roommates could possibly change that. And there’s certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures. But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train (This is Casey McQuiston’s brand new novel featuring time-travel, queer women, and I absolutely cannot WAIT to read it)

The Heiress by Molly Greely: Set in the Pride and Prejudice universe, this takes on Anne de Bourg (Lady Catherine’s daughter), and makes her queer! 

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters:  Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-hall stars in an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins (Sarah Waters is the queen of historical lesbians. All of her books are good, and they’re all gay! The Paying Guests is another great one)

(On a side note re: queer books, there are MANY, these are just ones I’ve read more recently. Also there are a lot of indie/self-published writers doing great work writing queer books, so definitely support your local indie authors!) 

[takebackthedream]

Time to Recall a Progressive ‘Truly Great’ First 100 Days by Harvey J Kaye

  The Resistance needs to develop a memory of how past generations confronted reactionary threats to American democracy.

FDR radio broadcast, 1933 Photo credit: Library of Congress

Franklin Roosevelt’s first “Hundred Days” of 1933, in which the newly-elected president and a Democratic-controlled Congress confronted the ravages of the Great Depression by enacting an unprecedented roster of 15 major new laws, have haunted the egomaniacal Donald Trump – and his own first 100 days as president have fascinated the media. While Trump in his own inimical way has been both dismissing the significance of the first 100 days and hyping the greatness of his own presidential performance in the course of those days, journalists and pundits have been keeping scorecards on him. But no consensus has emerged.

Brushing aside the Trump campaign’s apparent ties to Putin’s Russia and the flagrant greed and conflicts of interest of the new president and his family, conservatives have unashamedly celebrated his Cabinet and Supreme Court appointments, executive orders, budget proposals and legislative initiatives. Breathing a sigh of relief that the Affordable Care Act survives, liberals have anxiously mocked Trump for his reversals, betrayals and immediate failures. And recognizing the destruction already wrought and further promised, progressives woefully agonize about what he is doing to the nation.

Unfortunately, few have taken the time to recall what FDR and his New Dealers actually accomplished in their legendary “Hundred Days.” But we who are determined to resist, and fight back against, Trump’s and the right’s assaults on the public good – their war against the public programs that enable life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the public agencies and regulations that protect the environment and secure the rights of citizens as consumers, workers and voters; the public schools that empower generations; the public media, history and the arts that enrich our lives; and the public parks and spaces that allow us to refresh ourselves – should do so.

We should do so not only because Trump and his comrades have directly targeted FDR’s legacy for destruction, but also to remind us all how a progressive President and people launched a revolution and started making America truly greater. The Resistance needs to develop a memory of how past generations confronted reactionary threats to American democracy.

In the early 1930s, Americans had reason to wonder and worry about the future of American democracy. The Great Depression was destroying the economy and overwhelming public life and resources. But as much as Americans suffered, they did not suffer passively. Bearing the Stars and Stripes, Midwestern farmers were mobilizing and taking the law into their own hands to halt foreclosures and block shipments of produce to markets.

Organizing themselves in Unemployed Leagues, jobless workers were marching and demanding state and federal action to provide relief and jobs. And in 1932, 20,000 World War I veterans, many joined by their families, had made their way by every conveyance possible to Washington DC to petition Congress to immediately distribute the “Veterans’ Bonus” payments they were not supposed to receive until 1945. Sheriffs and their deputies fought farmers; police and hired thugs attacked workers; and General Douglas MacArthur led fully armed troops against the Bonus Marchers’ DC encampments – not to mention, southwestern state governments were repatriating both Mexicans and Mexican-Americans back across the border.

With unemployment, homelessness and hunger increasing, and unrest spreading, President Herbert Hoover seemed incapable of addressing the crisis. Echoing the fears and desperation of the upper-classes, Vanity Fair editorialized in its June 1932 issue, “Appoint a dictator!”

Though no less elite, Democratic politician Franklin Roosevelt, the son of Hudson Valley gentry, had a different view of things. He knew American history, and what he knew had led him to believe that to save democracy Americans had to do what they had done in the past – enhance it! He did not fear Americans’ democratic impulses. In fact, he told students at Milton Academy in 1926, he feared what might happen if they were too long thwarted.

As governor of New York (1929-1933), Roosevelt responded to the Depression by initiating a series of public programs and works projects to develop power resources, provide jobs and improve the lives of working people. But he fully appreciated that the crisis required concerted national action. At the Democrats’ Jefferson Day Dinner of 1930, he decried the accelerating “concentration of economic power.” And he told a friend: “There is no question in my mind that that it is time for the country to become radical for a generation.”

Campaigning for the presidency in 1932, FDR promised “bold, persistent experimentation” and plans that “put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Recognizing the need to create “work and security,” citing the imperative of a “more equitable distribution of the national income” and insisting that “economic laws are not made by nature [but] by human beings,” he “pledged” a “New Deal” that would include overseeing financial transactions; developing public-works projects; rehabilitating the nation’s lands and forests; easing the burdens of debt-ridden farmers and homeowners; raising workers’ purchasing power; and establishing a system of “old age insurance.” The point of government, he was to say, following Lincoln, “is to do for a community of people what they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”

In contrast to candidate Trump, FDR did not seek to exploit popular fears. Rather, he sought to remind Americans who they were and to engage their persistent hopes, aspirations and energies for the labors and struggles ahead. And he spoke not just of policies and programs, but also of America’s historic promise and how they might redeem and secure it anew. In a major campaign speech in San Francisco that September he proposed an “economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” to renew the nation’s original “social contract” and, in the words of the Declaration, guarantee “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Hoover portrayed Roosevelt as a radical. And he was essentially right. As FDR saw it, not simply the Depression, but the very political and economic order that had engendered it threatened American democratic life. “Democracy is not a static thing,” FDR would say, “it is an everlasting march.” Americans wanted action, were ready to march, and gave Roosevelt a landslide victory that November.

Taking office on March 4, 1933, with the Depression worsening and banks collapsing around the country, Roosevelt told Americans “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He then set his “Brains Trust” and “New Dealers” to work drawing up plans and bills and called for a Special Session of Congress to legislatively address the crisis.

Roosevelt brought a remarkable team to DC. It included Frances Perkins as secretary of labor, the first woman ever to hold a cabinet-level appointment; Harold Ickes as interior secretary and director of the soon-to-be-created Public Works Administration (PWA); and, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt as first lady. Notably, Perkins agreed to serve on the condition that FDR pursue the enactment of Social Security (which he would do in 1935); Ickes, a progressive Republican who had led the NAACP in Chicago and had strong ties to Native American peoples, would initiate the desegregation of his department; and ER herself would break the mold of presidential wives not only through her many speeches and writings, but also by ardently advocating the causes of women, labor, blacks and the young.

FDR included many a traditional “WASP” figure in his cabinet, but he quickly transformed official Washington by actively enlisting progressive Catholics, Jews and African-Americans to create, initiate and manage the policies and programs of the New Deal. Plus, his administration soon moved to end the repatriation of Mexicans.

When historians refer to Roosevelt’s “Hundred Days” they mean the 100 days of the 1933 special congressional session during which FDR and the Democratic-controlled Congress began to attack the Depression, relieve the needs of the poor and empower working people.

After enacting the Emergency Banking Relief Act, which subjected banks to public account and regulation and instituted federal deposit insurance, they rapidly proceeded to pass laws creating: the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to provide jobs and improve the national environment; the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), to regulate farm production and raise farmers’ incomes; the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), to provide jobs and basic necessities to the unemployed; the Tennessee Valley Authority Act (TVA) to develop an impoverished region of the South; policies to regulate securities transactions (which led to the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act setting up the Securities and Exchange Commission); the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to refinance mortgages on homes threatened with foreclosure; the “Glass-Steagall Act,” to separate commercial banking from the riskier investment banking; the National Recovery Administration (NRA), to revive and regulate industrial activity, raise workers’ wages, and reduce class conflict; and the Public Works Administration (PWA) to fund major public works projects and create jobs.

Through those acts and “alphabet soup” agencies, the Roosevelt Administration initiated the labors of relief, recovery, reconstruction and reform known as the New Deal. The Depression would persist, and some of the original New Deal experiments would falter and fail – in fact, clauses of the Industrial Recovery and Agriculture Acts would be declared unconstitutional in 1935 and 1936. Nevertheless, Roosevelt and the American people would move forward determinedly, pushing each other further than either expected to go.

The NRA was supposed to boost economic activity and employment in a democratic fashion by not only giving corporate executives, workers and consumers representation on the boards that were to issue the codes regulating production, prices and wages, but also by guaranteeing workers “the right to organize and bargain collectively,” abolishing child labor, and setting both a minimum wage and a maximum numbers of weekly work hours (35-40).

FDR himself projected even more progressive possibilities when he said, on signing the National Industrial Recovery Act into law: “no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” However, as much as the economy and workers’ lives improved, the NRA failed to produce the desired results. Corporate bosses – at the expense of small business interests and consumers – continually called the shots in writing the codes and repeatedly resisted workers’ efforts to organize. Still, workers would not be deterred. They would go on to fight for their rights and compel FDR to support the enactment of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, under which the federal government would directly back workers’ pursuit of “industrial democracy.”

The New Dealers had more success improving the state of agriculture – but not for all farmers. Instituting a system in which farmers voluntarily reduced their planted acreage and limited their production of basic commodities in return for government-guaranteed prices and subsidies (paid for by taxes on food processors), the AAA raised both agricultural prices and incomes. However, while Midwestern family farmers saw real gains, many thousands of southern tenants and sharecroppers, black and white, saw no benefits when large landowners refused to share government payments with them. Worse, when those landowners reduced their cultivated acreage, their renters and croppers were shoved off the land and into the ranks of the jobless and homeless.

Nevertheless, based on the achievements of the “Hundred Days,” FDR and his fellow citizens launched a democratic revolution – a revolution in which they would harness the powers of government and subject banks and corporations to public account and regulation, direct the federal government to address the needs of the poor young and old, empower workers to organize labor unions, expand the nation’s public infrastructure and improve the environment, and enhance educational opportunities and cultivate the arts – a revolution that truly enhanced American freedom, equality and democracy.

What we did once we can do again. Yes, it was a time of crisis, a crisis that demanded and licensed radical action. But given the right’s control of all three branches of government, what do you think we will soon be facing? Our turn to launch a democratic revolution approaches.

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (Simon & Schuster). He is currently writing Radicals at Heart: Why Americans Should Embrace their Radical History (The New Press).  Follow him on Twitter: @harveyjkaye.